Welcome back to What I’m Hearing+, coming to you from Los Angeles, where I’m doing meetings before seeing my White Sox take on the Dodgers, then hopping a plane for more meetings abroad.

This week, an examination of the streaming struggles ahead for CNN, a cable network trying to decipher the future of news when more than 75 percent of Gen Z audiences get their information from social media at least once a week, 48 percent of those audiences aren’t interested in cable news, and the linear TV model is slowly but surely melting away. David Zaslav has a much weightier challenge than simply a leadership transition.

In many ways, however, Licht was handed an impossible task. While the spotlight focused on CNN’s post-Trump political positioning, its fundamental headache is its business model. CNN wasn’t losing viewers simply because of Licht’s missteps; rather, CNN is a legacy cable news product suffering from secular, industry-wide decline. Pay TV subscriptions dropped to 58.5 percent as of Q1 2021, marking the lowest rate for Pay TV since 1992, and there’s less certainty than ever about the streaming model that aspires to replace it.

In the long run, of course, CNN will likely need to become a standalone, direct-to-consumer product that subscribers can add to their streaming bundle, either as an individual app or as a tile within Max. It will likely also become smaller. But that’s not possible at the moment: CNN’s linear programming is still exclusive to linear cable—an economic relationship that generates hundreds of millions of dollars in annual carriage feeds—or to vMVPD service like YouTube TV, Sling, or Hulu + Live TV. The much derided and quickly shuttered CNN+, which was meant to serve as a lifeboat from linear to streaming, was instead a combination of b-side content (Jake Tapper’s Book Club, etcetera) that was essentially an experimental zone, like Rupert Murdoch’s iPad-only news concoction, The Daily, another lifetime ago.

Anyway, as more consumers cut the cord, some kind of reorientation becomes inevitable. This reality is already dawning in the sports world, where ESPN, which has similar restrictions on its live programming, is preparing to transcend from ESPN+ (itself a low-risk streaming hub of b-side programming, like Peyton’s Places) to a full-on O.T.T. offering at some point. Disney reached this conclusion only after years of contemplating every conceivable option before coming to terms with the inevitable.

Now it’s decision time for news. The future of CNN, as with many cable brands, comes down to three options: 1) it can be rolled into a streaming bundle that generates less revenue for the network; 2) offered as an upsell to a smaller number of subscribers, or included in a slightly higher priced streaming platform; 3) or be spun off as a niche standalone service. In almost every scenario, it’s hard to imagine CNN ever being able to replicate the economics of the cable era, wherein carriage fees helped the business earn well more than $1 billion a year in profit during the Jeff Zucker era.

Nevertheless, there are useful lessons that WBD and CNN can adopt now as Licht’s interim successors navigate from cable to a post-linear future. And it all starts with analyzing the successes of digital news organizations (especially in social video), understanding the myriad ways that Gen Z audiences consume news (on TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, and Twitch), and facilitating a format innovation of their own.

Long-term sustainability requires looking at how younger Millennials and now Gen Z are actually consuming news. One recent survey of Gen Z, according to Statista, found that only 6 percent watch cable news programming daily, compared to 23 percent who are consuming news via streaming services. Just under 15 percent get their news from news-only websites, while 50 percent of survey respondents said they get their news via social media. What’s especially interesting is that while 23 percent of those Gen Z audiences get their daily news from streaming platforms, 28 percent never use streaming for news.

In other words, it’s a complicated audience to reach, but it’s not due to disinterest. Another survey conducted by the American Press Institute in 2022 found that just under 80 percent of young Americans (aged 16 to 40) seek out news daily. And while 45 percent of this audience said they do pay for some kind of traditional news source, 71 percent of the audience gets their news from social media, which doesn’t surprise anyone. Furthermore, about 25 percent of that audience gets their news from social video platforms like YouTube and Instagram, while another third gets it from TikTok and Twitter.

News organizations aren’t actually competing with other outlets—instead, they are competing with other formats. Axios’s bullet point style “smart brevity” delivery is one format, just as the 140 character (and then 280 character) tweet was another. Newsletters, like the one you’re likely reading now, are another. Sixty-second video breakdowns on TikTok are increasingly popular. News itself is still growing in demand, but the way it’s packaged has shifted, and will continue to do so. McKinsey found that 66 percent of teens get most of their news exclusively from push notifications.

Meanwhile, live news programs with growing audiences have either targeted hyper-specific groups (think Newsmax) or have found hybrid models that allow for a wider array of coverage while meeting audiences where they are. NBC News Now, for example, has an average viewer age of 35-40, putting it on the much younger side of traditional news consumption. The service has grew 13 percent between 2022 and 2023, with March 2023 its strongest month on record, according to NBCUniversal. By repackaging the livestream as part of a larger web product, NBC News Now is able to piggyback off search and social platforms to deliver video, text, and interactive news programming for an audience that’s glued to their phones and laptops, not a living room set-top box.

NBC News Now was slightly derided upon launch as something in between Cheddar (cheaper and commoditized programming, hosted by unknown talent) and CNN+ (a beach head in a new medium). Its success suggests, however, there is life for news after cable, but also that it will be different. What’s clear is that trying to make more of yesterday’s news for tomorrow’s audience is a fool’s errand. Traditional cable news anchors also matter less to this cohort. A YouGov study in 2022 found that most young Americans were not familiar with the vast majority of television news talent. Among those who they were familiar with, Anderson Cooper was ranked the most trusted. He got 44 percent of votes, but he was the sole CNN anchor listed.

Piker is not a journalist, nor would he call himself one, but his semi-interactive news analysis format has won a sizable audience for a generation that’s going to Twitch, not CNN, for news updates. Similarly, Philip DeFranco has built an audience of more than six million subscribers on YouTube by producing a daily news show that curates, explains, and comments on the big news stories of the day. One person straddling both worlds in Mosheh Oinounou, a former top CBS News producer whose Mo News on Instagram has 341,000 followers and captures the flavor of both generations.

There are two key takeaways here for CNN. First, the audience for social video and personality-driven live streams is massive, far exceeding the daily viewership of CNN. An average HasanAbi or DeFranco video typically has more than half a million views, with concurrent users on the top streams occasionally surpassing the viewership of cable news networks. And while it’s tricky to compare numbers across platforms, the most important data point is simply how much time younger viewers are spending on these alternative news services. There’s only so many hours in a day, and as engagement shifts to free platforms, those habits become stickier.

But second, and more worryingly, the economics of these platforms are simply not comparable: not even remotely close. Streamers like HasanAbi can generate in the low millions of dollars annually from advertising and partnerships, but that’s nothing compared to the half billion dollars or so that CNN receives annually from carriage fees alone. That sort of revenue can’t be replicated as a standalone service or distributed across social channels unless you have a cable-sized audience (about 70 million in the U.S.) paying in the neighborhood of $7 or $8 a year, or a much smaller subscriber base, say 7 million people, paying ten times that amount.

Perhaps the most obvious path forward is to offer live CNN on streaming as either a separate tier or slightly more expensive package for Max subscribers while renegotiating with the cable providers. While an additional paywall would potentially discourage a sizable number of people, and those who are willing to pay are going to want the CNN they know, not a CNN+-style knockoff, the expected price point should be low enough to build a meaningful audience.

Unlike a standalone ESPN streaming service, which would likely need to cost in the low hundreds of dollars a year to account for the rising cost of sports rights, an over-the-top CNN doesn’t need to exist on its own if the cost of running the network can be brought down significantly. (Indeed, this may be Zaz’s real long-term goal.) Especially if the operating cost is justified by a CNN tile increasing the frequency with which users open the Max app, the length of each session, and the app’s overall perceived value, which leads to decreased churn and higher advertising spend.

Meanwhile, Max can strategically offer some free CNN content—daily segments or select interviews—in front of the paywall, or with a free trial, in order to bring base-level subscribers into the premium tier funnel. WBD can also do more to leverage CNN’s website, which is currently the 87th most visited in the world, 33rd most visited website in the United States, and the fourth most visited news website overall. CNN.com’s audience is also 26.5 percent Millennials and 16.7 percent Gen Z, according to Similar Web. Just under 65 percent of that traffic comes from direct site viewing, too. Not bad.

And this, of course, is where the real opportunity lies. CNN can’t become the main app that young people spend time on; TikTok has won that battle for the foreseeable future. But it can be the first or second website that they check every day. Once there is a standalone streaming version of CNN, its website will be a massive l funnel too that can use every interaction to persuade visitors of the value of its landmark newsgathering service.

Yes, CNN is at the center of every news story about the future of news because CNN is still a Goliath. But it’s entering its own David moment in a sea of changing tech, changing distribution models, and changing audiences who aren’t as interested in getting their news the way their parents did. Of course, this was precisely the same challenge that Ted Turner was trying to solve nearly a half century ago when he launched his quixotic 24-hour news network. And that worked out pretty well, didn’t it?